This review comes from Makoto Hunter, a graduate student in history at the University of California–Santa Barbara studying American religious life at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and public memory. A former research and editorial assistant for the Intermountain Histories digital history project, she has authored two online public history series, titled “Mapping the Polygamy Underground” and “Confederate Markers in the Intermountain West.”

Reading Caroline Kline’s Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, has been an exercise of discovery, delight, and richly provoking insights. Based primarily on 98 anonymized oral history life interviews conducted with Latter-day Saint women of color (archived at the Claremont Colleges Library), Kline’s interdisciplinary work is part ethnography, part lived religion, and part theology. The book documents the lives of Latter-day Saint women of color, examines their experiences with and perspectives on intersections of religion, gender, race, and class, and argues for understanding their agentive lives through the lens of a shared moral orientation which Kline calls non-oppressive connectedness. Attentive to interviewees’ expressed priorities and values, Kline both shares their stories in their irreducible complexity and highlights key throughlines and contextually specific nuances in what ultimately synthesizes into a lay theology expressed from the margins of the tradition. As such, in addition to gathering personal, textured accounts of what it is like to live as a woman of color in Mormonism, Crossroads also expresses a Mormonism that is interpreted, adapted, and authored by women of color. This book is an indispensable companion for any study of contemporary Mormonism, particularly as expressed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Crossroads’ denominational focus).

Crossroads opens with a theoretical bang, as Kline shares how in her first interviews in Vera Cruz, Mexico, she noticed several of her interviewees “looked perplexed” when she asked them if “men and women are equal in the Mormon church?” Initially, Kline simply noted their discomfort but continued asking. “It would take dozens more oral life history interviews,” Kline explains, “before I came to realize why this question was unsettling: it led them to suspect that I was evaluating their lives and stories through a lens—that of gender equality—that did not fully reflect their dominant moral concerns or paradigms. They were right” (1).

From the beginning, Crossroads is both about Latter-day Saint women of color (still understudied in Mormon studies broadly) and about how to understand, study, document, humanize, and empathize with them as rational agents with complex lives and nuanced agency. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Saba Mahmood, Amy Hoyt, and Catherine Brekus, Kline notes how scholars too often flatten religious women’s experiences. When researchers claim women in traditional or patriarchal religions experience false consciousness, they assume a “paradigm of women’s equality or emancipation,” rooted in “Western liberative norms” that “do not necessarily reflect” the “dominant priorities and values” of traditional religious women (3). Instead of narrowly focusing agency on ideas about resistance that indict traditional religious women as “disempowered victims” (2), Mahmood, Brekus, and Hoyt argue that women are creative agents amid their religious practice as they variously embrace, negotiate, and resist social norms.

This does not mean gender equality is meaningless as a paradigm. Kline affirms it is especially “important and useful in pinpointing structural inequalities” but concludes it is “insufficient for analyzing the worldviews, actions, and moral priorities of nonfeminist Latter-day Saint women of color” (3) [1]. Instead, Kline finds that “in the stories of dozens of practicing Latter-day Saint women of color around the world,” an “ethical imperative of non-oppressive connectedness emerged as a theme,” that being the term Kline gives to a

worldview… [that] encompasses elements of female empowerment and liberation [but] is characterized by a broader moral focus on fostering positive, productive, and vitalizing relationality in a variety of realms. In this paradigm, gender inequality and gender complementarity are not primary moral evils or concerns. Indeed, the nonfeminist women I interviewed often found what could be described as liberation in their membership in this patriarchal church. Oppression and alienation from both God and other humans were the states against which these women were actively working. (3)

In other words, when the interviewees accept or even embrace patriarchal structures in Mormonism, they do so not as duped victims, but rather as rational agents making creative choices based on a set of priorities concerned with overcoming oppression in their own lives and strengthening their human and divine relationships.

In the three subsequent chapters, Kline uses non-oppressive connectedness as a lens on the stories and voices of Latter-day Saint women of color from Mexico, Botswana, and the United States, respectively. In each, Kline persuasively demonstrates non-oppressive connectedness at work and uses the paradigm to illuminate various women’s decisions to embrace, negotiate, or even reject Church teachings, policies, and practices, highlighting deliberateness in making choices about what they value, what they find difficult, and what they do not accept.

In the fourth chapter, “Toward a Mormon Womanist Theology of Abundance,” Kline brings to the fore an intellectual and spiritual “thread that ran through several women’s oral histories,” centering on “a worldview in which God’s love was vast and abundant, spiritual powers could be highly developed, and the opportunity to connect with God personally was unbounded” (132). With nuances particular to local contexts, this theology of “abundance” (a word specifically used by a few of the interviewees), considers salvation abundantly available, human capacity sufficient and “plenty” to accomplish God’s work, and revelation continual and expansive. “It is this kind of Mormonism,” Kline observes, “that attracts and inspires these Saints” on the margins “and helps keep them in the fold” (133).

Throughout the book, Kline tightly frames her research in a rich, interdisciplinary literature. In addition to the lived religion research of Mahmood, Hoyt, and Brekus, Kline also names and refers to the work of feminist scholars of religion such as Judith Plaskow, womanist theologians like Delores Williams, and historians of Latter-day Saint women from Jill Derr to Linda King Newell. Kline also thoroughly yet concisely contextualizes her findings in each regionally specific chapter, pointing out how her interviewees’ stories complement or complicate existing scholarship, whether about Latter-day Saints specifically or the region broadly. This grounds Crossroads and highlights its contributions to its many relevant subfields.

Crossroads’ contributions are especially significant for Mormon studies. By documenting the lives of women of color, especially in and from the Global South, Crossroads fills an ongoing gap, bringing attention to lay women of color on the Church’s geographical margins. Any study of the Church or Mormonism writ large would richly benefit from reading Crossroads. Kline’s work also provides further work on Mormon gender studies, as her book is not simply about women, but also about how women think about and practice womanhood, whether by attending female empowerment seminars in Mexico or by navigating the difference between wifehood and motherhood in Botswana, to give just two examples.

There are very few audiences I wouldn’t recommend Crossroads to. Researchers studying Latter-day Saints, or even other global denominations of Mormonism, would do well to read Crossroads and see how women on the margins play an important role in the whole story of Mormonism. Scholars of world Christianity will also find much to learn and mine from Crossroads about Mormonism’s place in the history of global Christianity, as will scholars of women and gender about what Mormon women reveal about gendered ideas and practices.

While retaining its depth, Crossroads is written so accessibly and with such clarity that the book would be entirely appropriate for student reading in a graduate or even upper-level undergraduate course in religion or Mormon studies. Each chapter builds on the previous but also includes enough context to stand alone, so instructors could productively assign either the whole book or individual chapters: perhaps the first or fourth for their breadth, or one of the middle three for more focused engagement with a region.

Finally, Crossroads has much to offer lay Latter-day Saints, and I would enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone with a stake in the tradition. The academy remains Crossroads’ primary audience, but like the feminist and womanist scholarship she cites, Kline’s research is not only about Latter-day Saints, but also is usable to them. As Kline points out, what few authoritative women’s voices there are in Mormonism are almost universally white (132). Crossroads begins filling that gap by documenting a theology expressed by women of color. While the book as a whole is primarily of scholarly value, and chapter four is no less professional, Kline recognizes that her interviewees have “formulated inclusive, inspiring, and hopeful religious insights” (160). Whether or not they gain purchase with their readers, these women’s theologies, expressed in word and experience, are a vital and living expression of the Latter-day Saint tradition and broader Mormon movement, deserving all the attention Kline has given and more. I am hopeful that Mormon Women at the Crossroads will be an excellent beginning to a highly fruitful direction in global Mormon studies.

[1] A small handful of Kline’s interviewees identified as feminists, and Kline notes this when she discusses how their worldviews both complement and vary from those of other interviewees.